


Stages

by Mireille



Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Genre: M/M, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-10-13
Updated: 2007-12-24
Packaged: 2019-03-13 09:14:55
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 6,272
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13567455
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mireille/pseuds/Mireille
Summary: A year in the life, post-Chosen; a collection of twelve snapshots.





	1. Blindness

**Author's Note:**

  * For [soft_princess](https://archiveofourown.org/users/soft_princess/gifts).



** I. Blindness **

November

Andrew was home. 

Okay, that had been a safe bet; it was eleven at night. He could have been at work, though, if something had come up that Xander didn't know about.

But Andrew answered the door, and Xander immediately felt guilty. Andrew had obviously been asleep; his hair was sticking up on one side and he was wearing a bathrobe thrown over a pair of pajama bottoms. Just the bottoms, no shirt, and that was, seriously, more Andrew-skin than Xander had needed to see in his lifetime. 

"Xander?" Andrew said, blinking at him. "What are you--is there something wrong?"

"I need your help," Xander said, starting to walk into the apartment. Andrew didn't move out of the way, though, and for a moment Xander wondered if--as unlikely as it sounded to him--Andrew wasn't alone. 

Then he realized what Andrew was doing, and shook his head, giving him a faint smile. "Still human," Xander said, reaching out and tapping his finger against the cross Andrew had apparently taken to wearing around his neck. He held it up for Andrew to see that the cross hadn't burned him. 

Andrew got out of the way. "It never hurts to be careful," he said. Or at least, that's what Xander thought he said; it was muffled by a yawn. 

Xander turned around to close the door, and when he turned back, Andrew had already gone over to the bookcase in the corner. "What kind of demon is it?". 

"Demon?" Xander reached up to rub the bridge of his nose. "There isn't a... okay, I see now that I was a little vague there." 

"Vampire? Werewolf? Ancient African curse? If it's a curse, though, we'll need to check the Council library. Mr. Giles doesn't like me to keep spell books at home." 

Considering that Xander thought he was a lot less disaster-prone than Andrew, and he'd managed to start a fire by accident around Giles' magic books, he figured that was a good plan. But Andrew sounded sulky, and so Xander just shook his head. "It's nothing like that. I just need a place to crash. Nobody was expecting me until tomorrow." 

"Oh," Andrew said, obviously disappointed that Xander hadn't turned to him in a crisis. "I don't have a spare room...."

"No problem," Xander said, shrugging. He wasn’t even really sure why he was there, except that Giles wasn't due back from Cleveland until tomorrow morning. "I'll just go to a hotel." The Council would probably pay him back--he was in England on business, after all, so it wouldn't be that big of a deal. 

"Unless you're okay with the couch?" Andrew said, hesitantly. "It's not very comfortable."

"If you saw my place in Blantyre, you wouldn’t ask," Xander said, dropping his backpack on the floor by the couch and sinking down onto it gratefully. "I swear, you won't even know I'm here." 

"I probably will," Andrew said, "unless you've stopped snoring." 

Xander was too tired to deny it.

***

December

"Merry Christmas."

"Oh, thank _God_ ," Xander said, then, when Andrew looked confused, tried to explain. "Everybody I've seen today has wished me a _happy_ Christmas, and while I do know that 'happy' and 'merry' mean the same thing, it's just _wrong_." He moved past Andrew, going over and setting the package he'd been carrying on the table. "I came bringing gifts and everything," he said. "In fact, that's kind of why I'm here. You weren't at Giles' place for me to give you your present." 

"I'm a lone wolf," Andrew said. "Spending my holiday in solitary reflection."

_Oh, shit_ , Xander realized, _he wasn't invited._ He'd been at the Council's holiday party, but not the smaller get-together on Christmas Day, and Xander hadn't thought about the possibility that he hadn't actually been invited. Buffy had sent an invitation to _Faith_. Of course, Faith was halfway around the world, so there hadn't been much chance of her actually showing up. And Andrew had probably invented "other plans," so nobody would have thought twice about it. 

He decided that just not mentioning it was probably the best way to deal with it. "I didn't know lone wolves wore aprons," he said. 

Andrew looked down at himself--striped apron, oven mitt on one hand--as if he hadn't realized what he was wearing. "I'm a man of many skills. Just because I walk alone doesn't mean that I didn't want Christmas dinner." Then, after a moment's pause, he added, "I think I have more than I can eat before Valentine's Day, though, if you wanted some." 

Xander had left Giles' place before dinner. When everyone had been gathered in the same room, it had just been too much. Too loud, too many people, too much pressure to make sure he looked like he was having a good time, whether or not he was.

He and Willow had hung out together the night before, and he was going to spend tomorrow with Buffy and Dawn, so it wasn't like he was being a _completely_ crappy friend. He'd just gotten used to being alone, and there wasn't much point trying to adjust when he'd just be going back to Malawi next week. 

But Andrew was just one person, and he obviously wasn't as okay with being alone on Christmas as he was pretending he was, and besides, something smelled really good. "That'd be great."

After dinner, they sat in the living room and watched some of Andrew's Christmas present. It turned out that English-DVD-player-compatible versions of the even-numbered _Star Trek_ movies had been _exactly_ the right thing to give Andrew, even if it had been partly so that Xander would be able to see them when he was in England. 

They'd watched the one with the whales a second time when Xander realized that it wasn't that he'd had a good time _in spite of_ spending Christmas with Andrew. 

He'd just had a good time, period, which wasn't something that happened all that often these days.

***

January

"I'm here to visit your DVD collection," Xander said, and to himself, he sounded almost cheerful. 

He _felt_ cheerful, too, the cheerfulness of a man who had just delivered a Slayer to the Council for training and now had a few days of unlimited hot water and Domino's pizza ahead of him. It was a nice change. 

None of the girls were in the country right now, and Giles was busy, so it had seemed like a good idea to come over here and see Andrew. It was Sunday afternoon, so Xander figured he wouldn’t be at work. 

Andrew had just waved him in and gone back to scribbling something in a magazine. No, Xander realized when he got closer, a puzzle book, like the kind his grandmother had always tucked into her shopping cart at the grocery store. 

He sat down on the couch next to Andrew, looking over his shoulder at the puzzle. "I was never any good at math." Not that Andrew had asked, but Xander didn't know what else to say when faced with someone doing number puzzles for fun. Someone who wasn't Willow, anyway; he'd stopped caring that she was smarter than he was sometime around first grade. 

Andrew looked up from the magazine. "It isn't really math. It's a logic puzzle. Let me find one I haven't done, and I'll show you--" He was already flipping back to the first part of the magazine, sliding closer to Xander to show him the puzzle. 

Xander put a hand up, shaking his head. "I don't like logic, either, not when I'm this tired." He picked up the remote from the coffee table and clicked the TV on. 

Andrew stayed where he was, though his attention went back to the puzzle he'd been doing, while Xander flipped through the channels. 

He must have been even more tired than he thought, because the next thing he knew, the room was a lot darker; the sun had gone down. The light on Andrew's end of the couch was on, and Andrew was still scribbling in his puzzle book, chewing on the pencil from time to time. 

"Sorry," Xander said, stretching and rubbing his eye. "Why didn't you wake me up?" 

Andrew shrugged slightly. "I figured you came here to watch TV, and if you were too tired, there was no reason to wake you up for it."

"There's a TV in my hotel room," Xander pointed out. "I came here to hang out with you." To his own surprise, he wasn't exaggerating. He'd had a good time on Christmas, and while sure, he was looking forward to rotting his brain with television, he could have done _that_ in his hotel room, too. 

This way, he had company, and the only time he thought "even if it's just Andrew," was when he realized that he hadn't been thinking that, at all. 

Andrew looked back down, but Xander thought he looked startled. Happy, but startled. 

Xander could live with that.


	2. Stupidity

** II. Stupidity **

February

Apparently, there was some sort of problem with Xander's phone bill. 

Xander hadn't seen it; the bill for his satellite phone went to the Council, since they were the ones who made him carry it. Not that Xander minded, because being stuck out in the middle of Africa without any way to get in touch with civilization was _not_ something he really wanted to experience. But Giles sent him a package every six weeks or so: soap and razors and sugar-laden breakfast cereal and all the other stuff that was either difficult-to-impossible to get, obscenely expensive, or just not _right_ here. And in the package that had been waiting for him yesterday, there was a note: _We need to discuss your telephone usage._

Which didn't make a whole lot of sense, not really. Xander hardly ever _used_ the phone. Except for emergencies and to confirm travel arrangements when he'd located another Slayer, he made three calls a week: one to Buffy and Dawn, one to Willow, and one to the Council, which was supposed to be to Giles. Giles was hardly ever in his office, so Andrew normally picked up, and Xander had eventually just started calling Andrew directly. 

So either somebody had figured out a way to charge phone calls to him, or Giles had decided the Council wasn't going to pay for him to listen to Dawn talk about some boy named Giacomo who Xander was really going to have to meet one of these days so he could get in some quality threatening of a surrogate-brotherly nature. 

Okay, so maybe his phone calls to the Council had been a little longer than normal. But when you spent time hanging around with somebody when you were in England, you started to have things to _say_ to them. And besides, Andrew was his lifeline to civilization--okay, they did, technically, have civilization in Africa. And Giles did, technically, send him care packages. But Andrew could tell him whether there were any good movies he'd missed, and what was going on in the comics he couldn't get his hands on very easily here, and what stuff he was taping off TV for Xander to watch the next time he was in England. Stuff that wasn't important to anybody else they knew. 

Then he found a photocopy of his phone bill tucked under the box of Coco Puffs, with some of the calls highlighted. Xander read one of the highlighted lines; it was for his call to the Council last week, for... 

Three hours and eighteen minutes, at what Giles had noted was a rate of thirty US cents a minute. That was... a lot of cents, for a phone call. He scanned over the rest of the highlighted calls. Two hours and forty-one minutes. Three hours and fifty-six minutes. And a short one, for only an hour and twenty minutes. 

Okay, maybe Giles had a point. Next time, he'd stop Andrew from actually _reading_ him the comics over the phone.

***

March

"You're still welcome to hang out," Andrew said. "The number to that Indian place you liked last time is on the fridge, and the stuff I've been taping for you is on the bookshelf. The tape's labeled 'Xander.'" 

"Yeah, right," Xander muttered. "You're not going to want me hanging around here."

Andrew gave him a blank look. "Even if you searched my briefcase for top-secret Council documents, most of them are stuff Giles wants me to make you read anyway." 

Xander shook his head. "Do you really want me hanging around your apartment when you come back?"

"I'm not bringing him _home_ , Xander. It's a blind date. What, you think I'd have sex with some guy the day I met him?" 

Andrew sounded offended, and Xander would have apologized if he hadn't been trying to cope with the words "Andrew" and "have sex" occupying the same space in his brain. It was just something that didn't happen. 

Of course, the words "Andrew" and "out on a date" hadn't ever been together in a sentence before now, at least not in Xander's experience, which was why Xander had been so surprised when it turned out that Andrew had plans that didn't involve him. "It's a _blind date_? He could be a nutcase! He could be a demon! He could even be a demon nutcase, and don't _tell_ me they don't exist." 

"You don't have to worry about me," Andrew said, smiling and patting Xander's shoulder. "We're meeting in a public restaurant. Besides, his sister says Michael's very sweet."

This Michael guy probably rescued kittens for a living, or taught blind kids how to read Braille, or something else not at all involving noticing that yes, that demon slime really _had_ eaten a hole in the knee of your good jeans. In short, exactly the kind of person that Xander would hate, and who would hate Xander, and there went the way he spent most of his free time when he was in England.

Besides, in what world did _Andrew_ have a date and Xander didn't? Not that Xander had really tried to date anybody. He'd been too messed up for a while, and then it just seemed like way too much work to try to find somebody who could even begin to put up with the fact that Xander spent ninety percent of the time in Africa and a lot of the other ten percent in meetings. For his job. Which was about fighting vampires. 

"Sweet," Xander repeated. "Yeah. You know, he probably is." He forced a smile; just because his life sucked didn't mean he wanted his friends' lives to suck, too. 

"Will you be here when I get back?" Andrew asked. "I've never had..." There was a pause, just a little too long, and then Andrew said, "You know. Anybody to talk to after stuff like this." 

Xander nodded. "Yeah," he said, even if he'd been planning to go back to his hotel. "Go. Have fun. I'll be here."

***

April

"Sure you don't mind me being here?" Xander said, hesitating just inside the doorway. 

"Have I ever minded?" Andrew shook his head, going back to sorting through his mail. Xander had met up with him at the Council offices and basically followed him home, even if he wasn't sure it was a good idea. He just knew that being alone _wasn't_ a good idea. 

"I figured you might have plans with--um, was his name Matthew?" 

"Michael," Andrew said, "and no. I'm not seeing him any more." 

Xander had kind of figured that, by the way Andrew had stopped talking about him on the phone about two weeks ago. "You _do_ know we could probably get a couple of Slayers to kick his ass," he suggested. 

Andrew blinked. "Why would I want to do that?" 

"Well, um, if he broke up with you...." he began, and then stopped when he realized Andrew was laughing at him. 

"Xander, he thinks _Charmed_ is _science fiction_. What were we going to talk about?" 

Okay, Andrew had a point. He couldn't actually see Andrew dating anyone but another member of geek-kind. Not that being a geek was bad, it was just that, well, he talked to Andrew a lot, and apart from work stuff, mostly, Andrew talked about geeky stuff. And sometimes normal everyday stuff like what the woman at Tesco had said to him, and whether he should cook or they should go out, and whether it was going to rain or not. 

And Xander owed the Council ninety-seven U.S. dollars for Andrew talking to him most of the night about everything in the world except how if he'd just driven a little faster, he'd have gotten to that village in time to save that Slayer who'd decided she'd lost her mind. 

"You talk to me okay," Xander said, trying to get the conversation back to places where he didn't have to think about that. 

"You're different," Andrew pointed out, and Xander looked over at him, waiting for the punchline. 

There wasn't one, though, just Andrew smiling at him, and by the time Xander realized that, the silence and the looking and the smiling had gone on for a weirdly long time. 

"So what do you--"

"I was thinking--" They both started talking at once, too fast and too loudly and Xander recognized trying to cover up the weirdness when he heard it. Or when he was doing it, for that matter. 

But he let it happen, because even if things hadn't worked out with Michael-who-didn't-know-science-fiction-when-he-saw-it, and even if Xander hadn't gone out with anybody since before they left Sunnydale, Xander had a track record for completely screwing things up. 

If Andrew wasn't talking to him, Xander didn't know who he was going to call the next time he needed five hours of distraction; everyone else had time for him, but not _that much_ time. And in this job, Xander was pretty sure there was going to be a next time.


	3. Realization

** III. Realization **

May

It wasn't that they were pretending nothing weird had happened the last time Xander had been there. They just weren't talking about it.

They hadn't agreed not to talk about it, either; they just... weren't. They still talked about the same stuff they always had, just not about that. 

After a couple of weeks, Xander had managed to convince himself that nothing weird _had_ happened, that the silences had just been silent, not awkward, and that he'd never considered, even for a billionth of a second, pointing out to Andrew that _they_ never seemed like they ran out of stuff to talk about these days, and had he mentioned that just because a guy had had a fiancée did not mean that he was a hundred percent straight? 

And then Andrew had picked him up at the airport. 

He'd mostly talked to the Slayer Xander had brought back with him, but when he'd finished welcoming her to England, he'd turned toward Xander and hugged him for long enough that people were staring at them. 

Xander was used to being stared at, and he thought he'd rather be stared at for excessive hugging than because somebody was working up to asking some really obnoxious question about his eye. At least this was something new. 

Then things went back to normal, and they'd gone back to the Council and got Tapiwa settled, and Xander started to think, again, that he'd imagined the whole thing. 

They'd gone back to Andrew's place, because that was what they did when Xander was in England--he'd be leaving tomorrow, and it would have been perfectly okay with Andrew, he was sure, if he'd said he wanted to go back to his hotel and crash. The thing was, he didn't really want to. He'd been looking forward to hanging out with Andrew. 

And then when they were sitting side by side on the couch, cartons of takeout on the coffee table and a movie in the DVD player, he said, "Hey, Andrew--" with no idea what he'd intended to come next. 

"What?" Andrew turned to look at him, and Xander really had _no_ idea what he'd meant to say next, only that he hadn't meant anything like _this_. 

As kisses went, it wasn't much, really, soft and light and quick, but not bad. Definitely not bad. When he pulled back, Andrew looked startled--which seemed pretty reasonable, since Xander had apparently _lost his mind_ , because maybe he _had_ meant this. Maybe some corner of his brain had been planning it all along.

But the startled look faded, and Andrew smiled, kissing him again--and Xander had moved his head, so that Andrew only found the corner of his mouth, but neither of them seemed to mind all that much. 

Xander didn't wonder until later that night whether the reason they hadn't talked about what happened last month was because it had happened a long time ago, and by now there just wasn't much to say.

***

June

This, Xander figured, was pretty much inevitable. 

They'd done a lot of talking over the past month, about evenly split between "this doesn't have to change anything" and conversations that made it obvious that, no matter what this didn't change, it had at least kicked "watching TV and arguing about _Star Trek_ " out of the top spot on the list of stuff they were going to do when Xander was in town. 

Not that they'd said anything _definite_ , it was just obvious that if Xander hadn't had a nine o'clock flight the next morning, stuff might have happened the _last_ time. This time, he was here for longer; Dawn would be in town at the end of the week, and he wanted to see her. 

And so he was here, at Andrew's--and he might as well stop having the Council pay for hotel rooms for him when he brought Slayers back, because he crashed on the couch here more often than not. 

Tonight was a "not," but he still wasn't in his hotel room. 

Andrew had a twin bed, and Xander found that he didn't really mind; Andrew had always been skinny, and Xander had lost a lot of weight over the past couple of years, so there was room, if they stayed close. He definitely didn't mind staying close; it had been a long time since he'd been this close to anyone--physically, he meant, because there were lots of people he was closer to than Andrew. Okay, maybe not lots, but a couple. 

But physically, no, not in a long time, not since Sunnydale. And so it was okay by him that things were going slowly, that they spent a good while just lying there, their only point of contact Xander's arm slung around Andrew's waist. Everything was gradual: the way they inched closer together on the narrow mattress; the way mouths slid over unexplored skin--lip to cheek to chin to throat; the unfamiliar feeling of a hard cock pressed his hip. Slow and gradual, and that way it didn't matter that Xander had never done this with a man before, that he would bet Andrew had never done it with anyone at all, because they had plenty of time tonight to get things right. 

He thought: _I want to get this right._

He thought: _I want to look like I know what I'm doing._

He thought: _I want--_

And then Andrew changed position, and there was friction on Xander's cock, the slide of Andrew's thigh and the shifting of Xander's boxers, and his brain stopped trying to finish the sentence, stopped worrying about whether Andrew was going to think he was clueless, and just thought, _I want_. 

If he thought about it too long, he was sure it was going to be weird to realize that he wanted _Andrew_ , but he made himself stop thinking and just concentrate on the part where this felt good. 

The next morning, the waking-up-next-to-someone part felt even better.

***

July

"So how are things going with you and Andrew?" Willow said, and Xander swore he could hear her grin coming through the phone lines. 

The only thing he could think to say in response was, "What?" which probably explained why Willow repeated herself. 

"No, I heard you," he said. "I just don't know why you're asking." Okay, in a very general sense, he knew why she was asking, because maybe there was, sort of, something with him and Andrew that she might be curious about. But it wasn't the kind of thing that he'd planned to talk to his friends about. 

Not that he was ashamed of it. It wasn't like he felt like he was supposed to never be involved with anyone ever again after Anya--well, he didn't feel like that _any more_ , and hadn't for a long time. And it wasn't that it was a guy, because he already knew his friends would be okay with that, and he'd gotten over being not-okay with that possibility a while back. It wasn't even that it was Andrew, because Andrew had grown on him, and Xander was pretty well convinced that Andrew, no matter what he'd done in the past, was one of the good guys now. 

It was just that this wasn't one of the kinds of things they needed to tell people about. He was still just hanging out with Andrew when he was in England, and talking to him on the phone--Andrew had found out that incoming calls were free to the sat phone, so he'd been calling Xander at least once more every week. And, okay, the hanging out had changed some in the past couple of months, but, well... it wasn't like they were a _couple_. They were just... friends. Okay, friends who occasionally fooled around, but still. Friends. 

"You know I was in London last week?" Willow said. "Andrew had a picture of you on his desk, and he told me about you guys." 

Xander didn't say anything--he really didn't know what to say--and Willow must have thought he was upset, because she said, "Was I not supposed to know? Because honestly, I know Andrew's not my favorite person, but if you're happy, then I'm happy for you."

Xander made his mouth work then, told Willow everything was okay and he was fine, happy, it was great, until he hung up the phone and realized that everything had gone wrong. He should have expected that. Things did. 

And he liked Andrew, liked him enough that he would never wish himself on Andrew. People who got involved with him were either evil or got hurt, and Xander really didn't want to find himself hoping that Andrew was just evil again.

Friends, Xander could deal with. Friends-who-occasionally-fooled-around, that had been fine, too.

But whatever Andrew seemed to think this was--whatever Xander had probably let him believe it was? 

He didn't think he could deal with that. Not now, not ever again.


	4. Luck

** IV. Luck **

August   
"So I'm not sure if we should keep doing this," Xander said, turning his head so that Andrew was on his blind side. He might need to say this, but he didn't want to watch himself screwing up. 

Andrew pulled his hand away. "Sorry, I thought you liked that."

"No. I mean, yes, but that's not what I meant." He sighed. "It's just... Willow told me she knows about us, and I'm not sure that we should... that there should be an 'us' to tell people about."

"Oh," Andrew said, and not being able to see him didn't help when Xander was imagining kicked puppies. 

He started talking again, the words coming out quickly in an effort to make Andrew understand. "This... what we've been doing, what I thought we were doing anyway--it's great. But I didn't know that you were going to think that we were, you know, _together_."

"Why is that such a crazy idea? We talk all the time. You're over here whenever you're in England. You didn't hate me when I found the _Star Wars_ holiday special on the Internet and made you watch it with me." Andrew paused before going on, sounding more uncomfortable than before. "And _this_ \--" his gesture took in the fact that they were both in bed, neither of them wearing more than underwear-- "doesn't exactly contradict that." 

For a minute, Xander thought about trying to convince Andrew that he'd got everything wrong again, that he'd rearranged reality to make things sound better than they really were. It wouldn't exactly be a new thing for Andrew, after all.

Then he decided he wasn't _that_ much of a jackass. "It's just... I didn't know."

"Well, now you do," Andrew said, and you'd have to be a lot dumber than Xander to miss the hopeful note of _so let's change the subject_ in Andrew's voice. 

"Yeah," Xander said. "Now I do. And I'm not sure that's what I want. That this, the way it is, is what I want." He took a deep breath. "It was all right before, wasn't it? When we were just kind of, I don't know, friends?"

"Yes," Andrew said. "It was all right before, but that was _before_. You kissed me, Xander, I kind of thought that meant stuff had changed."

"Not like this. I had no idea that you were going to think that we were... you know, a _couple_." 

"Oh," Andrew said again, and this time, it was cold enough that for the first time ever, Xander thought that Andrew might have been able to pull off the whole "supervillain" deal after all, _if_ he'd had someone standing next to him pissing him off the whole time. 

"Well, don't worry," Andrew went on. "I'm not thinking it any more." 

Five minutes later, Xander was out the door, still buttoning his shirt and trying to find a taxi that would stop for a half-dressed guy with an eyepatch who was out on the street at midnight.

***

September

"I can explain," Xander said. He was aware that was a lame opening for an apology, and he wouldn't have blamed Andrew for slamming the door in his face. 

Andrew didn't, but he didn't look all that happy to see Xander, either. He stayed in the doorway, and for someone who wasn't all that intimidating, physically, he did a pretty good job of blocking the doorway. 

"It's two in the afternoon," Xander pointed out. "If I were a vampire, I'd have been on fire before I got within six blocks of this place." To prove his point, he reached past Andrew, waving his hand just inside the door. 

"I know you're human," Andrew said. "I just don't know if I want you here."

"I can _explain_ ," Xander repeated, hoping Andrew would be curious enough to at least listen to him. "I don't blame you for being angry, but--"

Andrew shook his head. "I'm not _stupid_ , Xander, I _get_ it. As long as nobody knew about this, it was fine, but as soon as--"

"No!" Xander made an effort to lower his voice, suddenly very conscious that he was still standing in the hall. "God, Andrew, no, it's not about that. It's about... look. I can't do actual dating. You _knew_ Anya," he said quietly, realizing that this was the first time in all these months that either of them had actually mentioned her. The first time since Sunnydale that he'd ever been the one to bring her into the conversation, with anyone. "You know what I did to screw it up." 

"I know she still cared for you," Andrew said. "That has to count for something."

"It means she was better than I deserved," Xander said. 

"And I can see past--"

Xander interrupted him again. "No, you can't, Andrew. You don't have any special insight into the human heart, you don't possess the wisdom of the ages, and you don't know me better than I know myself, so can you just stop sounding like a cheap romance novel?"

"Don't I get to decide whether or not I need you protecting me?" Andrew said. "Because I don't. I can take care of myself; I've been doing it since I _got_ here." 

He had a point. He definitely wasn't anywhere near as helpless as he'd been in Sunnydale. Xander wouldn't _be_ here if he was. 

"I won't ever be here," Xander said. "I'm not asking to be transferred to London, or anything." 

"I didn't ask you to." 

"I'm a rotten boyfriend."

"I'm not arguing with that," Andrew said. "But we'll get better at it with practice."

"So, what, you're forgiving me just like that?"

"No." Andrew smiled a little. "I had a whole month to get over being mad at you. Besides, you're not going to do anything like that again." Then, hesitantly, he added, "Are you?"

"No. I'm sorry." 

"I know."

"I missed you."

Andrew stepped out of the doorway, and after a moment's hesitation, Xander came in.

***

October

"You haven't filed travel plans with the Council lately."

Xander sighed. "I haven't found any Slayers lately, and I don't think 'because I want to see Andrew' is a good enough reason for them to fly me back."

There was a long silence before Andrew said, "But you're taking leave next month, right? You'll be here then?"

"Um."

"...What does 'um' mean?"

"It means I will if you fill out the paperwork for me."

"Xander, this is important. If you're not going to bother to--"

"I'm bothering!" Xander said defensively, even though he couldn't really blame Andrew for doubting him. Andrew had made it clear that Xander still had a lot of "making up for being an idiot" to do. That was okay with Xander; he deserved it, and besides, by now, he'd had a lot of practice at it. He'd been an idiot for a couple of decades before he even _met_ Andrew. "It's just a huge pain to find anywhere that can do international faxes."

"All right," Andrew said, sighing. "I'll fill out the paperwork, but if you're not on that plane--"

"If I'm not on that plane, then I'm a way bigger jerk than... well, than I am," he finished when his metaphor failed him.

"Good."

"I'd probably be back next month anyway. I've never gone that long without finding at least one Slayer who's willing to come back for training."

"You need to be here on the eighteenth," Andrew said firmly. "Whether or not you've found a Slayer."

"Yeah, but _why_ the eighteenth? It's not your birthday. It's not _my_ birthday. I'm pretty sure they haven't moved Christmas."

"Do you remember the first time you slept on my couch?" Andrew asked.

Xander blinked. He remembered taking a standby flight, and getting an earlier connection than he'd expected, and turning up at Andrew's place... sometime before Christmas last year, but he really couldn't remember when. He could take a guess, though. "November eighteenth?"

"I just thought... well, we never actually had a first date, or anything, but... I thought we could count that. "

Xander grinned. "You're saying it's our _anniversary_?"

"Unless you... you don't mind, do you?" He could picture Andrew's expression now, wondered if Andrew was looking down at the floor like he was avoiding Xander's eyes, even if Xander couldn't see him over the phone.

"No, I don't mind," Xander said, still grinning. "I'd just never realized--" Then he broke off, because he _should_ have realized Andrew was like that. Andrew might have changed a lot over the past couple of years, but he hadn't changed _that_ much. "No," he repeated. "I don't mind."

He hadn't forgotten that this was probably going to end in disaster. 

But he kept hoping that maybe it wouldn't. 

And the "maybe it wouldn't" was enough for him to say, "I just hadn't realized," again, and when Andrew asked him again if he was going to be there, to say, "Wouldn't miss it for the world."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The chapter headings, and the basic story structure, came from a quotation I found while randomly poking around on the Internet. 
> 
> The quotation came from [here](http://www.tcnj.edu/~hofmann/Love.htm): 
> 
> _From my own personal experience, the stages [of love] are Blindness, Stupidity, Realization, and Luck. We blindly fall for someone, do stupid things, come to a realization of what has happened, and then luck out, either by escaping or by having a lasting relationship._


	5. BONUS: Timestamp meme: one year after the end of "Stages"

Remembering things like dates didn't come naturally to Xander. He remembered his birthday, Christmas, New Year's, and the Fourth of July with a reasonable degree of accuracy, and had even managed, at the last second, to remember  _Andrew's_  birthday this year; everything else, he tended to forget. But he'd made an effort this time, registered at one of those online reminder places so that any time he found five minutes to waste at an Internet cafe, there was e-mail in his inbox counting down the days to November eighteenth.  
  
He hadn't said anything to Andrew, though, just faxed in his paperwork directly to Giles and made his travel arrangements and enlisted one of the secretaries' help in making sure Andrew would be at the airport to meet a flight.  
  
Andrew was standing out by baggage claim, holding up a sign for the non-existent Slayer he was supposed to be meeting, and Xander felt guilty about the sneakiness when he saw how unhappy Andrew looked. Note to self, he thought, surprises were good, but not when they made Andrew think he'd forgotten completely.  
  
Andrew didn't even see him until Xander was right there, but when he did, his face lit up. "You remembered," he said, when Xander was close enough to hear.  
  
"I wasn't going to forget something like this," he was going to say, because it was their anniversary, and Andrew cared about that even if Xander was just glad they'd made it this far. But then Andrew was hugging him so tight he couldn't breathe, and he figured Andrew had gotten the message, anyway.

**Author's Note:**

> [me on tumblr](https://mireille719.tumblr.com)


End file.
